It's Friday, and I'm going to stop being a wanker

I hope everyone is having the awesome day that I am. Last friday, my group at work finally moved out of the basement and into new digs on the first floor of the building. I get to see daylight out my bosses window every day now, and that's never a bad thing. Plus, Rach had to get up early today so I was first one in the office. Reminds me how much I enjoy getting up early.

So, last night I had a run and swim scheduled, which gave me a chance to try out the integration between Training Peaks and my Garmin 305 as well as the brand new integration with my Finis Swimsense. I don't always like training, but I do love gadgets. Gadgets plus new technical/statistical things to think about make training pass quickly.

The run was Week 3, Day 1 of my Couch to 5k Training. I'm re-starting week 3 because I never finished it last week because of the trip to Erie. I didn't go all out because I figured this would be a good recovery run after Wednesday nights hard ride. I felt pretty good, but had an issue with my Garmin that I need to look into. (Link to run in Training Peaks: http://www.trainingpeaks.com/sw/TMXDMVLXEY35QANG7TQRJEJJ7Y)

Following the run I did 1000 yards in the pool: a 400 yd warmup, 8x25 (25 easy, 25 hard), then 4x100. My total time was 32 minutes, which is pretty good considering I did a lot of sprinting in those last 600 yards, and took several minutes of breaks. My swimming is coming around already and I'm really happy with that. (link to swim in Training Peaks: http://www.trainingpeaks.com/sw/R4JVYM26GJFNOQTQ7G3WFATASQ)

I got home and downloaded the workouts to Training Peaks, and it was super easy to get my run and swim not only into the system, but they automatically synced up with the workouts on my plan for that day. The Swimsense one is so automatic, you don't even have to select which workout you want, it just ports right over whenever you upload a workout from the watch to the Finish website. The Garmin one is slightly more work as you have to select which workouts you want to move, via the Training Peaks device manager, but even that is a piece of cake.

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The other thing I want to talk about was yesterdays post, which if you read it early enough you would have seen me making smart ass remarks about how if I could only average 10.9 MPH while pulling 100 watts and being exhausted that "it was time for me to consider another sport, maybe shuffleboard". A reader mentioned it jokingly, but after re-reading it, I pulled the comment and looking back I'm glad I did. 

I've come a long way in 2 years of racing, but that doesn't give me the excuse to be myopic about my performance. Just 2 years ago next month, it took me 2 1/2 hours to finish a sprint triathlon. a 12 mile bike with hills was 90 minutes of suffering for me. I've always thought that if I ever got any good at this sport (which I'm still not, and that does not appear to be in jeopardy anytime soon), that I would not be one of those douches who says things that belittles people slower than them.

While I didn't mean it that way yesterday, it sounded like I did, even when I read it knowing what I meant. I meant merely that I was proud of my progress and I didn't like that the computer was telling me I was slow and weak when I clearly wasn't. I need to remember I'm not that far off in time, or performance for that matter, from 90 minute 12 mile rides. Some people out there are just where I was 2 years ago and while I want them to see training will get them faster, they dont need to see it like that.

Notes:

- Tonight, another long swim, and then tomorrow a longer ride. Its probably going to still be too cold to ride outside, but I want to at least try. I'm going to put my aero bars on in the morning either way.